Choke on your hypocrisy…

I sometimes wish it were possible to choke on one's own hypocrisy. This way it wouldn't only be rock n roll legends like John Bonham or Bon Scott to die in such woefully undignified ways. And besides: if it were hypocrisy (and not, say, alcohol or drugs) to cause fatal accidents... well, perhaps the resulting deaths would not rob the world of quite so much talent, either.

Sadly, however, there are no known fatal side-effects involved in overdosing on one's own unbridled hypocrisy... at least, not for the hypocrites themselves. So people like Paul Borg Olivier can safely quake in horror and howl in protestation when threatened with 'prison' over a criminal libel suit, without actually running any risk of spontaneously combusting in the process.

And yet, and yet... Paul Borg Olivier (like everybody else in his party) should be the last person on earth to complain about the threat of prison thanks to criminal libel. This for two reasons: one, the PN has never shown any compunction whatsoever when it comes to threatening other people in exactly the same way (and I should know more than most, seeing as I have been threatened with the same sanction on several occasions).

Two, the PN has been in government for 23 out of the past 25 years - which is PLENTY of time to revise the law in order to remove precisely this threat from the statute books, Yet not only did they never remove it (how could they, when they themselves have so often used the same threat as a weapon to silence their critics?)... but they have also doggedly resisted several calls for its removal by the Council of Europe and the Institute of Maltese Journalists.

Nor is this exactly the first time this issue has been discussed locally. Interestingly enough the removal of imprisonment as a sanction for criminal libel was debated in a parliamentary committee chaired by Franco Debono only last July (and this in turn was not the first time, either). And guess on whose advice it was decided to retain the law in its present form - threat of prison and all? Francis Zammit Dimech, that's who.

This is how it was reported at the time: "In a recent parliamentary committee for the consolidation of laws meeting, two MPs - Franco Debono from the Nationalist Party and Jose Herrera from the Labour Party -agreed that criminal libel should be removed in a review of libel laws.... Dr Zammit Dimech agreed that criminal libel laws were out of date. But, he said, loopholes in the civil law section needed to be addressed, especially when the injured party would have no recourse to compensation. He suggested leaving criminal law as a possibility of recourse in this regard."

So let's see if we can work this one out for ourselves. The Labour MP on this committee wanted the law overhauled; and the Nationalist MP who would go on to rebel against his party - and eventually get himself kicked out of it altogether - agreed.

But it was on the advice of the only PN member left standing that a decision was taken to keep the threat of prison in the statute books. And now, just seven months later, it is another member of the same party to complain when this selfsame threat - which his party insisted on retaining for so long, and in spite of so many calls and occasions to have it removed - is suddenly levelled against himself.

I mean honestly; I don't think the word 'hypocrisy' quite suffices to gauge the sheer extent of the two-facedness of this astonishing turn of events.

Oh, and perhaps I should also point out that this discussion had taken place place against the wider backdrop of a European-wide discussion on the subject of press freedoms. Even as Francis Zammit Dimech argued against removing criminal libel from Maltese law, a similar discussion in Tajikistan (no offence or anything, but hardly a shining light in the global fight against human rights abuses) took the very opposite decision: abrogating its own equivalent of criminal libel, in a move that was widely applauded in Europe.

A little later, Russia would do the opposite under Vladimir Putin: re-instituting criminal libel after this had been removed as one of the effects of perestroika in the 1990s.

And this in turn means that Malta - thanks to the PN - chose to follow what must be among the least democratic models in Europe today.

Please note that I haven't even mentioned the sheer amount of the times the PN itself has filed criminal libel against everybody and his dog... without ever (not even once) pausing to question the acceptability or otherwise of resorting to such a blatant, undisguised attack of freedom of speech.

A few examples. In 2004, the entire executive of the Nationalist Party filed what was probably a record for libel suits ever filed in a single day (some 14, as I recall)... against this newspaper, for daring to suggest that some people within the PN had 'celebrated' at the resignation of John Dalli in July that year.

It is well worth remembering that Lawrence Gonzi had only been party leader for a few months. So the decision to file a multitude of libel suits in what can only be defined as a declaration of war on the press - aimed at silencing an independent newspaper for the grave crime of not prostrating itself and kissing his own feet, as he evidently expected - was one of his very first actions as a leader who had only just promised us a 'new way of doing politics'.

This is how Harry Vassallo, then chairman of Alternattiva Demokratika, described it at the time: "The attack by a massive political party-cum-government-cum-media-empire on a small independent newspaper is shameful in itself. It can also be taken as a signal to all other critics that the PN is no longer prepared to tolerate the slightest criticism. It can be expected to strike terror in the hearts of the fainthearted. Perhaps it is meant to do so."

And in case you think that this was an isolated slip which the PN would later regret... think again. In July 2012, former EU ambassador Richard Cachia Cachia resorted to criminal libel action against Labour whip Joe Mizzi and One TV editor Kurt Farrugia, over allegations that he had obstructed the course of justice with regard to a 'cocaine party' which may or may not have involved his friends.

Meanwhile I am fully aware that it's just not kosher to wish misfortune upon others, but I for one sincerely hope that someone in the PN - ideally, someone who has resorted to criminal libel him or herself - is actually imprisoned as a result of a criminal libel suit.

This, it seems, is the only thing that will finally convince the Nationalist Party that such words as 'democracy', 'human rights' 'freedom of speech' and so on, are not just pleasant sound-bites that help them win elections every five years. Perhaps if one of their own actually paid the price for the PN's failures in this respect, the party as a whole might finally come round to realising how hopelessly lethargic and useless its government has been on the things that matter the most: i.e., JUSTICE, which (ironically) was once one the battlecry upon which they rode into power in 1987 on a very specific commitment to modernise Malta in these and other respects.

Yet in the case of freedom of expression they did not modernise Malta at all. The situation with regard to press freedoms has not changed in any significant detail since the last time journalist was imprisoned for libel... which I believe was in 1974 (though I stand to be corrected).

And I see no commitment in the PN's manifesto - or anywhere else for that matter - to change it in future.